2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38
The sorrel beetle loves to feast on the leaves of the growing sorrel very much. However, he will not refuse fresh rhubarb. This pest wintering in the depths of the soil is capable of producing several generations per season. Nimble leaf beetles in the blink of an eye gnaw holes in sorrel leaves and place freshly laid eggs on them, from which larvae subsequently emerge, continuing to actively damage leaf tissues. If you do not start a timely fight against these nimble parasites, you can only dream of a large sorrel harvest
Meet the pest
The sorrel beetle is a bluish or greenish beetle, the size of which ranges from 4 to 6 mm. These pests belong to the chrysomelin subfamily, which is a member of the large family of leaf beetles. The last sternites of their abdomens are distinguished by the absence of the characteristic reddish coloration.
Approximately at the end of May, the harmful beetles mate, and the females begin to lay eggs, placing them on the lower sides of the leaves in compact groups of forty to fifty pieces each. Eggs of pests are painted in yellowish or orange tones, and spindle-shaped larvae of sorrel leaf beetles growing up to 5.5 mm in length are distinguished by a dirty yellow color and incredible harmfulness - they actively skeletonize leaf parenchyma, leaving only the upper skin of the leaves intact. Having fed enough, the voracious larvae pupate in the soil, and after about a week, young bugs begin to harm the sorrel.
These pests can be encountered in Eastern Siberia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, as well as in the United States, Europe, Korea and Turkey. Moreover, in the middle lane, two generations of pests most often appear per season, and in the south - several.
How to fight
You can scare off oxalic leaf beetles from the site by dusting the growing crops with a mixture of ash and tobacco dust, combined in a 1: 1 ratio. This procedure is repeated every four to five days. Dusting the leaves with ground hot pepper will also serve well. You can also collect bugs manually, but this option is only suitable if there are not very many of them on the site. The collected bugs are thrown into a jar with a very strong saline solution. The detected eggs of harmful parasites are also thrown into the same solution.
Against the larvae of younger ages, insecticidal infusions can be safely applied: garlic (a pound of carefully crushed onions is poured with three liters of water and kept indoors for three days, after which 60-100 g of infusion is combined with ten liters of water and 50 g of soap) or tobacco (400 g of powdered tobacco leaves are insisted in ten liters of water, and immediately before processing the plants, the infusion is mixed with 40 g of soap and diluted with water, spending two parts of water for each part of the infusion).
And to prevent the safe wintering of harmful bugs, a thorough digging of the beds and row spacing will help. You can also use all kinds of covering materials. For example, a light spunbond thrown over the beds will help not only get rid of sorrel leaf beetles, but also get a relatively early harvest. Sometimes you can cope with sorrel leaf beetles by simply mowing badly damaged sorrel and sprinkling the beds with ash.
As for various chemicals, it is strongly discouraged to use them on sorrel. Moreover, chemicals that are approved for use on a given culture simply do not exist. If the number of bugs on the site is too high, it is allowed to process sorrel with such biological products as Fitoverm or Bitoxibacillin. It is only necessary to keep within with such spraying a couple of weeks before the start of collecting the leaves.
In addition, it is always possible to reseed sorrel to the other end of the plot, where no crops from the buckwheat family were previously grown (rhubarb, sorrel, etc.).
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